IT/Datacenter & Super Computing News - Page 4

Indiana University is currently building out its exciting new Big Red 200 supercomputer, which will have an insane amount of computing power, as well as some delicious new technology including AMD EPYC CPUs and unreleased NVIDIA Ampere GPUs. Check out the video of the initial first phase build:

The university is celebrating its 200th year, which is where the name 'Big Red 200' comes from (red is also Indiana University's color scheme). Inside, Big Red 200 packs 672 dual-socket nodes that will be powered by AMD's kick ass EPYC 7742 'Rome' CPUs that each pack 64 cores and 128 threads for a total of yes-it-can-run-crysis 86,016 cores and 172,032 threads.

The first phase sees the CPUs being deployed thanks to AMD EPYC 7742 chips, but the university had the stars aligned as they were offered to use NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere GPUs. At first, Indiana University was going to use NVIDIA's current-gen Tesla V100 GPUs that are based on the Volta GPU architecture -- but Brad Wheeler, the vice president for information technology and chief information officer at IU explained they "decided to take the machine in two phases" when NVIDIA offered something special "at the last minute".

Intel recently announced its new codename Horse Ridge chip, a new cryogenic control chip that will assist quantum computing systems. The new chip is being made available to commercially viable quantum computers, with the company co-developing the Horse Ridge chip between Intel Labs and QuTech.

Horse Ridge is an exciting cryogenic control chip that is capable of controlling multiple qubits (quantum bits) at the same time, with Intel explaining that this specific part of a quantum computer system is an "essential feature". Quantum computing is still in its early days, with Intel putting its efforts into the interconnects and control electronics -- and not the production of the qubits.

Right now, quantum computers use existing electronic tools to link quantum systems inside of a cryogenic refrigerator -- this actually holds back qubit performance so Intel is being Intel and wants to push that. Current quantum chips and computers require absolute zero cooling to work, while Horse Ridge can actually work at just over absolute zero -- 4 Kelvin.

In a world-first, scientists from the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation of data between two computer chips thanks to quantum entanglement.

This breakthrough is significant in the fact that the scientists sent the information from one chip to another chip -- while they were physically separated, and had nothing to do with each other. The researchers have said that this recent breakthrough could open the world of quantum computers and quantum internet.

The team used a pair of entangled photons on the chip, and then performed a quantum measurement on one of the photons -- and thanks to quantum entanglement (where the two particles are intertwined they can communicate over extremely long distances) the other chip saw its properties changed, almost magically.

It looks like we have finally found a system that can actually run Crysis -- the new Cerebras CS-1 system that is a new system for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. So while it might not run Crysis, it is a powerhouse for AI developers.

Cerebras CS-1 is actually quite small considering its processing power, with the 26-inch-tall PC packing an insane 400,000 cores and an even crazier 1.2 trillion transistors. The 400,000-core processor is called the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) which has a trillion transistors, 18GB of on-chip SRAM, and an interconnect speed of up to 1PB/sec (yeah, petabytes per second).

The exciting WSE processor is absolutely huge, where next to a keyboard it looks fake even -- but this 1.2 trillion transistor processor indeed packs 400,000 processing cores. Cerebras Systems founder Andrew Feldman explains: "The CS-1 is the industry's fastest AI computer, and because it is easy to install, quick to bring up and integrates with existing AI models in TensorFlow and PyTorch, it delivers value the day it is deployed. Depending on workload, the CS-1 delivers hundreds or thousands of times the performance of legacy alternatives at one-tenth the power draw and one-tenth the space per unit compute".

Google has reached a monumental achivement for the future of quantum processors and quantum computing, with their experimental quantum processor completing a 10,000-year task in just 3 minutes, 20 seconds.

In a blog post on Google's website, Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained that Nature published its 150th anniversary issue with the big news that Google's team of researchers have achieved a "big breakthrough in quantum computing known as quantum supremacy".

Google flexed its new quantum processing muscles to stretch and achieve that quantum supremacy, with Pichai explaining: "As we scale up the computational possibilities, we unlock new computations. To demonstrate supremacy, our quantum machine successfully performed a test computation in just 200 seconds that would have taken the best known algorithms in the most powerful supercomputers thousands of years to accomplish".

There has been tons of news around AMD's new 7nm, and Intels fight to retain market share over the past months. Today this article is all AMD as they worked with CRAY to create something truly insane.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has once again contracted the team at CRAY to build their follow-up to the Archer supercomputer. Archer 2 is reported to offer up to 11x the throughput of the previous Archer supercomputer put into service back in late 2013.

Archer 2 is going to be powered by 12,000 EPYC Rome 64 Core CPUs with 5,848 compute nodes, each having two of the 64 core behemoths. The total core count is 748,544 ( 1,497,088 threads) and 1.57PB for the entire system. The CPU speed is listed as 2.2GHz, which we must assume they are running off of the base clock, so that would be EPYC 7742 CPUs with a 225W TDP. These sorts of specs are insane but also will make some significant heat. Archer 2 will be cooled by 23 Shasta Mountain direct liquid cooling and associated liquid cooling cabinets. The back end for connectivity is Cray's next-gen slingshot 100Gbps network compute groups.

Everyday we are moving one step more closer to unlocking the mystery behind quantum computing and the benefits it can provide the human race. Today is yet again another one of those days.

According to researchers out of the The Johns Hopkins University, a newly discovered superconducting material has been found to have the "properties that could be the building blocks for technology of the future." Quantum computing is the most complicated computing humans are currently working on, and if you have a general grasp of how normal computers work then you should be able to appreciate the complexity of any quantum progression.

Normal bits that are present in all traditional computers use 0 or 1 to represent an electrical voltage pulse to store information. Quantum computers which are based on the laws of quantum mechanics use quantum bits or better known as qubits. These qubits exist in both the 0 state and the 1 state, but also both states at the same time. This is called a superposition, perhaps you have heard of the famous qubit example called Schrodinger's cat?

D-Wave announced its next-gen quantum computer dubbed 'Advantage' which during the announcement, had its first customer lined up for the next wave in quantum computing.

D-Wave's new quantum computer already has its first customer with nuclear weapons research site Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) securing the next-gen quantum computer. This isn't LANL's first business with D-Wave either, it'll actually be their third upgrade to their in-house D-Wave quantum computer.

Los Alamos National Laboratory associate director for simulation and computation, Irene Qualters, said in a statement: "This is the third time we will have upgraded our D-Wave system. Each upgrade has enabled new research into developing quantum algorithms and new tools in support of Los Alamos' national security mission. Quantum computing is a critical area of research for Los Alamos".

The fight for quantum supremacy might have just been tipped into Google's favor, with the search giant saying it has reached a major milestone towards the development of quantum computing.

A recent paper was published and then quickly pulled on NASA's website, which read that "this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor". The research paper was titled "Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor".

Google's in-house quantum computer smashed through a calculation of a random number generator in just 3 minutes and 20 seconds, versus the world's fastest supercomputer -- Summit, which would take around 10,000 years. The authors of the paper wrote: "To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor". Impressive stuff.

HPE has teamed with NASA on future supercomputer collaboration, with HPE providing its new Aitken supercomputer for future missions to the moon. HPE and NASA Ames Research Center have signed a four-year, multi-phase partnership over its Aitken supercomputer.

NASA will use HPE's new Aitken supercomputer for its Artemis program, which will see humans returning to the moon in 2024. Artemis will be handling calculations, modeling, and simulations of entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the moon.

Inside, HPE's new Aitkin supercomputer is based on HPE's SGI 8600 HPC platform, which is a tray-based, scalable supercomputer cluster.